I was looking through the blog I created for a grad school course and came across my personal learning theory. I wanted to share it here.
Education is one of the more important things that happen in a person’s life. It is one of the few things that can never be taken away from a person. No matter what you lose, you will never lose your education. The education system was set up years ago to fit what was needed. Society has rapidly changed and is evolving more quickly each day. The educational system has struggled to keep up with those changes. Education needs to give learners the skills they need to be successful in their careers of choice. Its goal should be to create citizens that can adapt to new jobs or careers that they take on because there is no way to know what careers will available in the future. Education should focus on learners and the skills they need to become employees or employers who will learn the skills they need to be successful and implement those skills successfully. Learners need to be given skills through the content that is taught in the classes required. Many students will not need advanced math or science concepts in their everyday lives, but they need the problem-solving skills taught in those advanced classes. The skills students gain in the course should be the key, not the content. Many educators believe their content is the most critical thing and miss the opportunity to help with skill acquisition. Education needs to realize that the jobs students might hold do not exist or exist in different forms today than when the learners will hold those jobs. Many of the support jobs in K-12 education environment did not exist a few years ago. These essential positions help students with special needs or help with technology integration into the lesson plan cycle to help student engagement. These are examples of positions that were not around a decade ago that exist today. The people in these positions had to either learn their roles or lean on people who defined them before them. We need learners to set up these roles for positions that are not around today. The educational environment is the perfect place to help teach these skills, even in positions that change today from how they were done in the past. We need to create learners that never stop learning and keep looking for ways to do their jobs better. These skills are taught in classes that allow for student choice and student’s voice. Students know how they learn best. They are experts not in the content they are learning, but they are experts on how they learn best. They might not know or have ever been asked to help in their learning. These students need to be looking at their own learning and exploring those skills, and learning how to make their learning better. These are some of the most overlooked skills needed in today’s society that are not addressed in education. Students also need to create projects and learn in ways they find interesting. This will increase student knowledge and engagement because students are interested in the things they are learning. Interests are used to help students create personal connections to learning. This will allow students to have a bigger stake in their learning, which creates more engaged students. Students that are more engaged learn the content better. It is a way to help students learn the content and skills at the same time. This is the best way to simulate a work-type environment in the educational system. Education needs to help create citizens that are ready for any career they will have. If education focuses on getting learners the skills they need to succeed in learning skills for their jobs, it will be a successful system.
I started in a middle school that did not have much in the way of technology. Each classroom had a projector; most were not mounted initially, which would project on a pull-down screen or a dry erase board. In the last year or two, we all got interactive boards to boost the technology at each campus. After a few years in a social studies classroom, I got the opportunity to transition to an Exploring Careers and Professional Communication classes. These classes had never been offered in the district before. That means there was no set curriculum for the courses. As part of my transition, I wanted to get a classroom with desktop PCs to try out in regular coursework. Before this, computer labs had only been used in technology courses.